Failure analysis of fractured components

This chapter describes in detail a proposed procedure for performing failure analysis of fractured components, taking as its foundation the knowledge of fractography presented in the previous chapters. It includes a critical analysis of the ASTM E2332 standard procedure, in order to give a broader description of its methodology, and is complemented with a discussion about the ethics in failure analysis. An entire section of this chapter presents the relations between fractography and the failure criteria of continuum mechanics and fracture mechanics, in order to provide a quantitative approach to failure analysis, which helps in estimating failure loads, critical flaw size and the fracture toughness of the material. In order to fully illustrate the usefulness of the proposed methodology, three examples of failure analysis of different fractured components are included. In these examples, the cause of failure, the calculation of the failure loads and the fracture sequence and mechanism are determined.